Beast Breaker: Beast Concepts

Early beast designs. The player fights beasts by pinballing around to break the tiles that make up their body, so there was even an element of level design! Each beast has to create interesting shapes to bounce in.
My first texture concepts focused on alien materials that would be satisfying to break and do cool things as they're destroyed, like light wisps that float away or fish tanks that spill fish all over the arena.
The design paradigm shifted in pre-production away from linked "bones" to separate floating body segments, and we ended up doing the tile textures in-engine, rather than hand-drawn. I miss you dearly, Weird Vine Crab. You can see things finally come together in the frog and tiger, with the magenta bones and floating segments. What a journey!